No more downtime - Amazon S3 based external JavaScript hosting | Hacker News Reader

No more downtime - Amazon S3 based external JavaScript hosting

visualwebsiteoptimizer.com

13 pointsparaschopra11 comments

But S3 does go down, even if they have SLAs. A Google search is your friend:

http://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+s3+downtime

I don't think anyone can guarantee downtime, but you sure can minimize it.

Yes, fully agree with you. But Amazon will have thousands of engineers 24x7 for fixing up if things go really bad. Amazon S3 is a way to ensure someone will be working to get the site up again if servers go down 2 am in the morning and somehow SMS alerts don't reach my phone.

even worse:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=typhoon+fiber+int...

S3 is meant as a storage system and very reliable in storing bits, but not serving them. CloudFront is meant as a CDN and very reliable in serving bits.

CloudFront is meant as a CDN and very reliable in serving bits.

Unfortunately, in my experience, its not. We tried CloudFront in production and occasionally ran into horrible latencies - 20 to 30 seconds in the worst cases. We ended up switching back to S3 and see much more consistent performance.

Maybe they've fixed those problems since, though.

Doesn't CloudFront builds over S3? I was reading about CloudFront and what I understand is that it is basically a distribution mechanism for S3.

Yes, CF is a CDN that sits on top of S3. It's usually very easy to turn on. Spend the hour to get it all running and you'll be glad you did.

Yes, was just reading the comparision here http://www.bucketexplorer.com/documentation/cloudfront--amaz...

Sadly, it says changes on Cloud Front take 24 hours to refresh plus it doesn't support HTTPS. While the latter is still okay but the first condition defeats the purpose of the whole setup.

You are still better off simply making a copy of the JS you are including and not having to put that 'huge responsibility' on someone else. It's the code you've tested against, after all. And if you feel S3 provides better reliability, you can put it there yourself. S3 fallback isn't going to do anything about 'I'm letting arbitrary 3rd party code run on my page'.

That will not work for my specific case because even if my users include static JS file, they cannot include static JS file which will stall their browser in case the server falls.

If your servers go down, how will JS files on S3 will help you?

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